pesher

noun

1. An interpretive commentary on scripture, especially one in Hebrew.

   “In 1807, Manasseh Illier sought in his Pesher Dabar (Solution to the Problem) to bring unity into the ranks of Jewry by reconciling all the factions of the conflicting schools of thought through the harmonization of reason and faith.”

   “In commenting upon lQ28b, Abbe Milik referred to this fragment as a pesher on the Psalms, but since that time the document has been augmented by new fragments, and it appears certain that it is, in fact, a commentary on Isaiah.”

   “Of all the Dead Sea texts it is the Habakkuk pesher (1QpHab) that, by common consent, exhibits the most impressive agreements with a Targum text.”

   “The classification of the Qumran commentaries by Jean Carmignac into the continuous and thematic pesharim is based upon typological issues rather than such concerns as the dates of publication: for former more or less follows sequentially continuous biblical passages while the other draws its proof-texts from a variety of biblical books around a particular theme.”

   “A similar method is followed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly in those documents we have already described as peshers — but in the latter not quite so blatantly, as the ethos of the interpretation generally remains the same as that of the interpretation generally remains the same as that of the underlying passages”